[Allen]
There’s been lot of publicity recently about some releases of immigrant detainees. You were explaining to me that there’s a numerical issue you face, explain that?

[Janet Napolitano (November 29, 1957)] Source: LYBIO.net
Well, there was a story that ran last week that said, we released 2,000 detainees because of sequester. That is really not accurate.

[Allen]
That was not a Politico story by the way.

[Janet Napolitano]
It was not a Politico story, I will hasten to say, and I won’t say who put it out there. But as in all things immigration it develops its own mythology. Here is the deal. We are constantly as the Secretariat is now moving people in and out of detention, these are immigrants who illegal immigrants, who from one reason to another are judged better in detention than under some alternative. With sequester looming and the end of this continuing resolution in a couple of weeks, it’s like the perfect storm.

We really have to manage so many different things, because we don’t have a budget. But the normal ebb and flow accounted for many of those releases and these are people who are removed, or they were bonded out or their status was changed for whatever reason. I think however for sequester getting ahead of that looming deadline career officials made the decision that there were some very – what I could call very low level, low risk detainees that could be put into a supervised released program, and that’s what happened.

And we’re going to continue to do that recognizing. Secretariat don’t really understand, they rock in a hard place analogy. On the one had Congress says you have to maintain 34,000 beds and on the other hand they say and we’re not going give you really the money with which to do that and they don’t also give you any flexibility to move money safe from another account from which to handle that. So we’re going to manage our way through this by identifying the lowest risk detainees and putting them into some kind of alternative to release.

[Allen]
But this is related to sequester or its not?

[Janet Napolitano]
Several hundred are related to sequester, but it wasn’t thousands.

[Allen]
And it’s going continue?

[Janet Napolitano] Source: LYBIO.net
For the foreseeable future, yes.

Let me just make an observation here…

Janet Napolitano Blasts Media For Sparking Mythology About Release Of Illegal Immigrants. We really have to manage so many different things, because we don’t have a budget. Complete Full Transcript, Dialogue, Remarks, Saying, Quotes, Words And Text.